Robert Webb Quotes

I reckoned my accent and class would count against me; I didn't see actresses as being working-class.

There's always been a nasty strain of class prejudice ingrained in the condemnation of football's 'undeserving rich,' as if the working class is uniquely susceptible to being corrupted by money, and as if they deserve their wealth less than those born to it.

I come from an Irish working-class background but went to a posh school, and any type of pretension was quickly mocked at home. I've always had a keen eye for pretension.

Being a posh actor in England you cannot escape the class-typing from whatever side you look at it.

I didn't necessarily grow up in a trailer park, but there is a brief part of that in my life. So I can make fun of it a little bit. I'm not too much of an outsider, where I'm just making fun of someone.

Joanna points her camera at a section of society unused to having cameras pointed at it. But I don't know about categorizing them in terms of class; I'm a bit wary of that. My dad is the son of a shipbuilder.

Labor, under their current leadership, want to be the Downtown Abbey party when it comes to educational opportunity. They think working class children should stick to the station in life they were born into - they should be happy to be recognized for being good with their hands and not presume to get above themselves.

The current leadership of the Labor party react to the idea that working-class students might study the subjects they studied with the same horror that the Earl of Grantham showed when a chauffeur wanted to marry his daughter.

England is strictly class-based. What's surprising is how many films are still made with a load of people in silly frocks running around gardens and talking in middle-class accents.

In the States everyone aspires to be middle class. It's so engrained into the American psyche: As long as you work hard you're going to be rich some day. The history of Britain is that if you're born working class, you're going to stay there, although that is changing.

‘The laboring poor’ is a detestable, canting phrase.

There were the well-to-do intellectuals, pushed toward Fascism by their hostility to the working masses and by their disdain of the uncouth ways of the Socialists who, without adequate preparation, had taken possession of many municipalities and had been administering them in a manner even more ridiculous than dishonest.

If you're white working class, it's very easy to caricature the elites, and if you're elite, it's very easy to caricature the white working class.

My family wasn't involved in the college. They were more of just your 'white trash' kind of family. And so I have that kind of background, but I always kind of aspired to be something else, and I made a lot of different friends over the years that were passing through.

In Britain, when the working class are summoned for fiction, it's 'isn't it a shame, isn't it a pity, isn't it awful, the terribly poor things... ' whereas from within, it's nothing like that. It's fantastic, it's glamorous, it's terrible and good the same as it is for everybody.

Working-class people don't tend to be wooed by celebrity.

I think there's a certain sense of grounding that comes from not being a rich kid from a media-elite school.

Having gone to a public school, I thought I knew about posh people. But I didn't know anything until I went to Oxford.

The fact that I spent my life in universities in a manner that I no longer have close identification with bricklayers is a pain to me.

I never met a poor person who wanted to soak the rich; they want to get rich.

Sharpe is my favorite role of all that I've played. He's a very complex character. He knows that he's a good soldier, but he will always have to fight the prejudice of aristocratic officers because of his rough working-class upbringing. On the battlefield, he's full of confidence - but off it, he is unsure, a bit shy and ill at ease.

I'm not anti-middle-class in the slightest. Look at me! I am very pro people putting time and money and effort into trying to improve the world.

When I was a youngster, I was brought up in a very political background on an estate in north London.

We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.

Class still matters in Britain today.